In the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s, many private employers
in the United States enacted fetal protection policies that barred
fertile womenthat is, women who had not been surgically
sterilizedfrom working in jobs that might expose fetuses
to toxins. In Fetal Rights, Women's Rights, Suzanne Samuels
analyzes these policies and the ambiguous responses to them by
federal and state courts, legislatures, administrative agencies,
litigants, and interest groups. She poses provocative questions
about the implicit links between social welfare concerns and
paternalism in the workplace, including: are women workers or
wombs?

Placing the fetal protection controversy within the larger societal
debate about gender roles, Samuels argues that governmental decision-makers
confuse sex, which is based solely on biological characteristics,
with gender, which is based on societal conceptions. She contends
that the debate about fetal protection policies brought this
ambiguity into stark relief, and that the response of policy-makers
was rooted in assumptions about gender roles. Judges, legislators,
and regulators used gender as a proxy, she argues, to sidestep
the question of whether fetal protection policies could be justified
by the biological differences between women and men.

The fetal protection controversy raises a number of concerns
about women's role in the workplace. Samuels discusses the effect
on governmental policies of the ongoing controversy over abortion
rights and the debates between egalitarian and relational feminists
about the treatment of women at work. A timely and engrossing
study, Fetal Rights, Women's Rights details the pattern
of gender politics in the United States and demonstrates the
broader ramifications of gender bias in the workplace.

Suzanne Samuels is assistant professor of political science
at Seton Hall University. She is also a lawyer and a member of
the New York State Bar. Her research interests include gender
and the law, judicial decision-making, interest group litigation,
and AIDS & HIV issues.

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